Oddly enough, though, this game's announcer always only says Multiple when selecting the power-up. Since this game was never released in Europe or North America, this graphic was never used. In the international releases of the previous Gradius games, the 'Option' power-up was called 'Multiple'. These filler tiles are in the Cell stage tileset. No clue on this one, and that's probably not even the correct palette. Small and large blue plasma balls in the same style as the energy balls shot out by Bacterion at the end of the game. The developers might have originally planned to keep the volcanic eruption that prefaced the Big Core boss fight in the first game. Uses palette 1B in the Gradius stage, which, again, isn't used by any other object. The volcanic rocks used in the previous Gradius games. It would certainly explain why the player loses all of their power-ups after being transported to either stage. It's plausible that in the Gradius and Salamander stages, those ships would be used in place of this game's standard Vic Viper design. The Gradius ship uses the default ship palette, while the Salamander ship actually has a custom palette loading during the Salamander stage (palette 16) that's not used by any other object in the game. The ships from the first Gradius and Salamander are in the ROM. The palette for this object is loaded during the 'flying big crystal cubes' section of the Crystal Maze, so it might have been meant to appear as an added obstacle there. At one point in development, the Crystal Maze might have been more closely based on Gradius II's Crystal stage. Similar, less-detailed crystals appear in Stage 3 of Gradius II as destructible objects. In the actual game, those vines just explode like everything else does.Ī whole mess of non-cubical crystals. Small and large vines shriveling up, which would have been used after the Choking Weed boss is defeated. Maybe they could have dropped down from the ceiling or jutted up from the floor or something? No such luck, though. Could have made good obstacles in the underground section. Even though they both have special falling animations, the final game still uses the same rock design used everywhere else in the stage, which isn't even animated! Small and large boulders, likely meant to be used in Stage 3's digging section. Even though there are three different designs, the final game only uses one of them. Two unused rock designs for use in Stage 3's underground section. Two unused enemy hatch designs, both of which have the same retractable base. They did make it into the SNES port, albeit as a palette swap of the power-up capsules instead of having a separate design. The blue screen-clearing power capsules seen in previous Gradius games are conspicuously absent in this one. The title screen image is 320×240 pixels, but the game's resolution is 320×224, so the last 16 lines of the image get cut off. Whoa.Īn interesting concept that never made it to any Gradius game: these Shields would actively home in on and destroy enemy bullets. The last cut power-up that was later added to the SNES port. Maybe you'd be able to stack multiple fields? The shield in the icon looks larger than the normal Force Field graphic. Another power-up that made its way into the SNES version. This would make Options rotate counterclockwise around the ship. There don't seem to be any graphics for this icon left in the game besides the name of the power-up. This was later implemented in the SNES port.

Options would surround the ship in an arrow formation. Since there's no telling exactly how this power-up would work, an icon can't be properly constructed. This could've been an early version of the Spread Gun (which can be upgraded to a three-way shot) or an entirely different power-up. A similar concept was used ten years later in Gradius IV. This would drop floating mines behind the player ship instead of missiles. This is the only scrapped power-up that has unique graphics in the ROM: Unfortunately, none of them seem to have been properly coded, so the icons are all that's left of them. There are eight Edit Mode icons in the game's ROM for power-ups that were cut, some of which previously appeared on the spin-off games.

Gradius iii rom snes